The Business of Open Source User Foundations (Consortia)

I held a talk on open source user foundations today, at the OpenUp Camp in Nuremberg. The slides are available as a PDF or on slideshare, embedded below:

A small anecdote on the side

In preparation of the talk, I looked for academic publications on the Kuali Foundation. I found only one, but I couldn’t download it because my university library does not subscribe to the (highly expensive Elsevier) journal that it was published in. So I requested a copy from the librarian and they went to work. They found another library that subscribed to the journal and requested a copy. In this day and age you’d expect they send me the PDF, but no such luck. The other library had to get out the paper copy of the journal issue and make a physical copy of the paper and then send the paper to me using postal mail. When I returned home from the talk today, I found an email in my inbox that the copy had finally arrived, two weeks after I had requested it. Sadly, I had already held the talk that I had needed the paper for. Needless to say, such publishers are really unpublishers.